


nutf'.' 

mil 



nmmwtmmmnumiiiumwmn 



, _..r.CHANISM ' 
In Thought and Morals 






, 


■ 5» 


JCn 


."VV 



?-£--y- 



/Ji 



MECHANISM 



THOUGHT AND MORALS, 



AN ADDRESS 

DELIVERED BEFORE THE PHI BETA KAPPA SOCIETY OF 
HARVARD UNIVERSITY, JUNE 29, 187O. 



WITH NOTES AND AFTERTHOUGHTS. 



BY 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 



Car il ne faut pas se m^connaitre, nous sommes automates autant 
qu'esprit." — Pascal: Pensies, chap. xi. § 4. 



BOSTON: 
JAMES R. OSGOOD & CO., 

LATE TICKNOR & FIELDS, AND FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO. 
187I. 



P5 \V^ 
U7i 



Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1871, 

By OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, 

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



Boston : 
Stereotyped and Printed by Band, Avery, & Frye. 



INTEODUOTIOR 



It is fair to claim for this Essay the license 
which belongs to all spoken addresses. To 
hold the attention of an audience is the 
first requisite of ever;f^ such composition; 
and for this a more highly, colored rhetoric is 
admissible than might please the solitary 
reader. The cheek of a stage heroine will 
bear a touch of carmine which would hardly 
improve the sober comeliness of the mother 
of a family at her fireside. 

So too, on public occasions, a wide range 
of suggestive inquiry, meant, to stimulate 
rather than satiate the interest of the listen- 



4 INTRODUCTION. 

ers, ma;^', with some reason, be preferred to 
that more complete treatment of a narrowly 
limited subject Avhich is liable to prove 
exhaustive in a double sense. 

In the numerous notes and other additions, 
I have felt the right to use a freedom of ex- 
pression which some might think out of 
place before the mixed audience of a lit- 
erary anniversary. The dissentient listener 
may find himself in an uneasy position hard 
to escape from : the dissatisfied reader has 
an easy remedy. 



MECHANISM 



IN 



THOUGHT AND MORALS. 



AS the midnight train rolls into an inter- 
mediate station, the conductor's voice 
is heard announcing, " Cars stop ten minutes 
for refreshments." The passengers snatch a 
brief repast, and go back, refreshed, we will 
hope, to their places. But, while they are at 
the tables, one may be seen going round 
among the cars with a lantern and a ham- 
mer, intent upon a graver business. He is 
clinking the wheels to try if they are sound. 
His task is a humble and simple one : he is 
no machinist, very probably ; but he can cast 
.a ray of light from his lantern, and bring out 
Uie ruig of iron with a tap of his hammer. 



6 MECHANISM 

Our literary train is stopping for a very 
brief time at its annual station ; and I doubt 
not it will be refreshed by my youthful col- 
league before it moves on. It is not unlikely 
the passengers may stand much in need of 
refreshment before I have done with them : 
for I am the one with the hammer and the 
lantern ; and I am going to clink some of 
the wheels of this intellectual machinery, on 
the soundness of which we all depend. The 
slenderest glimmer I can lend, the lightest 
blow I can strike, may at least call the atten- 
tion of abler and better-equipped inspectors. 

I ask your attention to some considerations 
on the true mechanical relations of the think- 
ing principle, and to a few hints as to the 
false mechanical relations which have intruded 
themselves into the sphere of moral self- 
determination. 

I call that part of mental and bodily life 
mechanical which is independent of our 
volition. The beating of our hearts and the 
secretions of our internal organs will go on, 
without and in spite of any voluntary effort* 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 7 

of ours, as long as we live. Respiration is 
partially under our control : we can change 
the rate and special mode of breathing, and 
even hold our breath for a time ; but the 
most determined suicide cannot strangle him- 
self without the aid of a noose or other 
contrivance which shall effect what his mere 
will cannot do. The flow of thought is, like 
breathing, essentially- mechanical and neces- 
sary, but incidentally capable of being modi- 
fied to a greater or less extent by conscious 
effort. Our natural instincts and tastes have 
a basis which can no more be reached by the 
will than the sense of light and darkness, or 
that of heat and cold. All these things we 
feel justified in referring to the great First 
Cause : they belong to the " laws of Na- 
ture," as we call them, for which we are not 
accountable. 

Whatever may be our opinions as to the 
relations between "mind" and "matter," our 
observation only extends to thought and 
emotion as connected with the living body, 
and, according to the general verdict of 



8 MECHANISM 

consciousness, more especially with certain 
parts of the body ; namely, the central organs 
of the nervous system. The bold language 
of certain speculative men of science has 
frightened some more cautious persons away 
from a subject as much belonging to natu- 
ral history as the study of any other func- 
tion in connection with its special organ. 
If Mr. Huxley maintains that his thoughts 
and ours are " the expression of molecular 
changes in that matter of life which is the 
source of our other vital phenomena;"^ if 
the Rev. Prof. Haughton suggests, though in 
the most guarded way, that " our successors 
may even dare to speculate on the changes 
that converted a crust of bread, or a bottle 
of wine, in the brain of Swift, Moliere, or 
Shakspeare, into the conception of the gentle 
Glumdalclitch, the rascally Sganarelle, or 
the immortal Falstaff," "^ — all this need not 

^ On the Physical Basis of Life. New Haven, 
1870, p. 261. 

2 Medicine in Modern Times. Londoii, 1869, 
p. 107. 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 9 

frighten us from studying the conditions of 
the thinking organ in connection with 
thought, just as we study the eye in its 
relations to sight. The brain is an instru- 
ment, necessary, so far as our direct observa- 
tion extends, to thought. The "materialist" 
believes it to be wound up by the ordinary 
cosmic forces, and to give them out again as 
mental products: ^ the "spiritualist" believes 
in a .conscious entity, not interchangeable 
with motive force, which plays upon this 
instrument. But the instrument must be 
studied by the one as much as by the other : 
the piano which the master touches must be 
as thoroughly understood as the musical 
box or clock which goes of itself by a spring 
or weight. A slight congestion or softening 
of the brain shows the least materialistic of 

^ " It is by no means generally admitted that 
the brain is governed by the mind. On the con- 
trary, the view entertained by the best cerebral 
physiologists is, that the mind is a force developed 
by the action of the brain." — Journal of Psycho- 
logical Medicine, July, 1870 ; Editor's (W. A. 
Hammond) Note, p. 535. 



10 MECHANISM 

philosophers that he must recognize the strict 
dependence of mind upon its organ in the 
only condition of life with which we are 
experimentally acquainted. And what all 
recognize as soon as disease forces it upon 
their attention, all thinkers should recognize, 
without waiting for • such an irresistible 
demonstration. They should, see that the 
study of the organ of thought, microscopi- 
cally, chemically, experimentally, on the 
lower animals, in individuals and races, in 
health and in disease, in every aspect of 
external observation, as well as by internal 
consciousness, is just as necessary as if mind 
were known to be nothing more than a 
function of the brain, in the same way as 
digestion is of the stomach. 

These explanations are simply a concession 
to the timidity of those who assume that 
they who study the material conditions of 
the thinking centre necessarily confine the 
sphere of intelligence to the changes in those 
conditions ; that they consider these changes 
constitute thought; whereas all that is held 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 11 

may be, that they accompany thought. It 
is a well-ascertained fact, for instance, that 
certain sulphates and phosphates are sep- 
arated from the blood that goes to the brain 
in increased quantity after severe mental 
labor. But this chemical change may be 
only one of the factors of intellectual action. 
So, also, it may be true that the brain is in- 
scribed with material records of thought ; but 
what that is which reads any such records, 
remains still an open question. I have meant 
to leave absolutely untouched the endless dis- 
cussion as to the distinctions between " mind " 
and " matter," ^ and confine myself chiefly to 
some results of observation in the sphere of 
thought, and some suggestions as to the 
mental confusion which seems to me a com- 
mon fact in the sphere of morals. 

The central thinking organ is made up of 
a vast number of little starlike bodies embed- 

^ Matter itself has been called " frozen force," 
and, as Boscovich has said, is only known to us as 
localized points of attraction and repulsion. 



12 MECHANISM 

ded in fine granular matter, connected with 
each other by ray -like branches in the form 
of pellucid threads ; the same which, wrapped 
in bundles, become nerves, — the telegraphic 
cords of the system. The brain proper is a 
double organ, like that of vision ; its two 
halves being connected by a strong trans- 
verse band, which unites them like the 
Siamese twins. The most fastidious lover 
of knowledge may study its general aspect as 
an after-dinner amusement upon an English 
walnut, splitting it through its natural suture, 
and examining either half. The resemblance 
is a curious freak of Nature's, which Cowley 
has followed out, in his ingenious, whimsical 
way, in his fifth " Book of Plants ; " thus 
rendered in the old translation from his origi- 
nal Latin : — 

" Nor can this head-like nut, shaped like the brain 
Within, be said that form by chance to gain : 
For membranes soft as silk her kernel bind, 
Whereof the inmost is of tenderest kind. 
Like those which on the brain of man we find ; 
All which are in a seam-joined shell enclosed. 
Which of this brain the skull may be supposed." 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 13 

The brain must be fed, or it cannot work. 
Four great vessels flood every part of it with 
hot scarlet blood, which carries at once fire 
and fuel to each of its atoms. Stop this 
supply, and we drop senseless. Inhale a few 
whiffs of ether, and we cross over into the 
unknown world of death with a return- 
ticket ; or we prefer chloroform, and perhaps 
get no return-ticket. Infuse a few drachms 
of another fluid into the system, and, when it 
mounts from the stomach to the brain, the 
pessimist becomes an optimist ; the despairing 
wretch finds a new heaven and a new earth, 
and laughs and weeps by turns in his brief 
ecstasy. But, so long as a sound brain is 
supplied with fresh blood, it perceives, thinks, 
wills.^ The father of Eugene Sue, the nov- 
elist in a former generation, and M. Pinel in 
this, and very recently, have advocated doing 

^ That is, acts as the immediate instrument 
through which these phenomena are manifested. 
So a good watch, in good order and wound up, 
tells us the time of day. The making and wind- 
ing-up forces remain to be accounted for. 



14 MECHANISM 

away with the guillotine, on the ground that 
the man, or the nobler section of him, might 
be conscious for a time after the axe had 
fallen. We need not believe it, nor the story 
of Charlotte Corday; still less that one of 
Sir Everard Digby, that when the execu- 
tioner held up his heart to the gaze of the 
multitude, saying, " This is the heart of a 
traitor ! " the severed head exclaimed, " Thou 
liest ! " These stories show, however, the 
sense we have that our personahty is seated 
in the great nervous centre ; and, if physiolo- 
gists could experiment on human beings as 
some of them have done on animals, I will 
content myself with hinting that they would 
have tales to relate which would almost rival 
the legend of St. Denis.^ 

^ There is a ghastly literature of the axe and 
block, of which the stories above referred to are 
specimens. All the express trials made on the 
spot after executions in 1803, in 1853, and more 
recently at Beauvais, have afforded only negative 
results, as might be anticipated from the fact 
that the circulation through the brain is instantly 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 15 

An abundant supply of blood to a part 
implies a great activity in its functions. The 
oxygen of the blood keeps the brain in a 
continual state of spontaneous combustion. 
The waste of the organ implies as constant a 
repair. " Every meal is a rescue from one 
death, and lays up for another ; and, while 
we think a thought, we die," says Jeremy 
Taylor. It is true of the brain as of other 
organs : it can only live by dying. We must 
all be born again, atom by atom, from hour 
to hour, or perish all at once beyond repair.^ 

arrested ; and Pere Duchesne's eternuer dans le 
sac must pass as a frightful pleasantry. But a 
distinguished physiological experimenter informed 
me that the separated head of a dog, on being 
injected with fresh blood, manifested signs of life 
and intelligence. — See London Quarterly Review, 
vol. Ixxiii. p. 273 et seq. ; also N. Y. Medical 
Gazette for April 9, 1870. The reader who would 
compare Dr. Johnson's opinion of vivisection with 
Mr. Huxley's recent defence of it may consult the 
Idler, No. 17. 

^ It is proper to say here, that the waste occur- 



16 MECHANISM 

Such is the aspect, seen in a brief glance, 
of the -great nervous centre. It is constantly 
receiving messages from the senses, and 
transmitting Orders to the different organs by 
the " up and down trains " of the nervous 
influence. It is traversed by continuous 
lines of thought, linked together in sequences 
which are classified under the name of ''laws 
of association." The movement of these 
successions of thought is so far a result of 
mechanism, that, though we may modify 
them by an exertion of will, we cannot stop 
them, and remain vacant of all ideas. 

My bucolic friends tell me that our horned 
cattle always keep a cud in their mouths : 
when they swallow one, another immediately 
replaces it. If the creature happens to lose 

ring in an organ is by no means necessarily con- 
fined to its stationary elements. The blood it- 
self in the organ, and for the time constituting a 
part of it, appears to furnish the larger portion of 
the fuel, if we may call it so, which is acted on 
by its own oxygen. This, at least, is the case 
with muscle ; and is probably so elsewhere. 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 17 

its cud, it must have an artificial one given it, 
or, they assure me, it will pine, and perhaps 
die. Without committing myself to the ex- 
actness or the interpretation of the statement, 
I may use it as an illustration. Just in the 
same way, one thought replaces another ; and 
in the same way the mental cud is sometimes 
lost while one is talking, and he must ask his 
companion to supply. its place. "What was 
I saying? " we ask ; and our friend furnishes 
us with the lost word or its equivalent, and 
the jaws of conversation begin grinding 
again. 

The brain being a double organ, like the 
eye, we naturally ask whether we can think 
with one side of it, as we can see with one 
eye ; whether the two sides commonly work 
together ; whether one side may not be 
stronger than the other ; whether one side 
may not be healthy, and the other diseased ; 
and what consequences may follow from 
these various conditions. This is the subject 
ingeniously treated by Dr. Wigan in his 
work on the duality of the mind. He 



18 MECHANISM 

maintains and illustrates by striking facts the 
independence of the two sides ; which, so far 
as headache is concerned, many of my audi- 
ence must know from their own experience. 
The left half of the brain, which controls 
the right half of the body, is, he believes, the 
strongest in all but left-handed persons.^ 

The resemblance of the act of intelligence 
to that of vision is remarkably shown in the 
terms we borrow from one to describe the 
other. We see a truth ; we throw light on a 
subject ; we elucidate a proposition ; we darken 

^ Gratiolet states that the left frontal convolu- 
tions are developed earlier than the right. Bail- 
larger attributes right-handedness to the better 
nutrition of the left hemisphere, in consequence 
of the disposition of the arteries; Hyrtl, to the 
larger current of blood to the right arm, &c. — See 
an essay on " Eight and Left Handedness," in the 
Journal of Psychological Medicine for July, 1870, 
by Thomas Dwight, jun., M.D. ; also "Aphasia and 
tbe Physiology of Speech," by T. W. Fisher, in the 
Boston Medical and Surgical Journal for Sept. 22, 
1870. 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 19 

counsel ; we are blinded by prejudice ; we 
take a narrow view of things ; we look at our 
neighbor with a jaundiced eye. These are 
familiar expressions ; but we can ' go much 
farther. We have intellectual myopes, near- 
sighted specialists, and philosophers who are 
purblind to all but the distant abstract. We 
have judicial intellects as nearly achromatic 
as the organ of vision, eyes that are color- 
blind, and minds that seem hardly to have 
the sense of beauty. The old brain thinks 
the world grows worse, as the old retina 
thinks the eyes of needles and the fractions 
in the printed sales of stocks grow smaller. 
Just as the eye seeks to refresh itself by 
resting on neutral tints after looking at bril- 
liant colors, the mind turns from the glare of 
intellectual brilliancy to the solace of gentle 
dulness.; the tranquillizing green of the sweet 
human qualities, which do not make us shade 
our eyes like the spangles of conversational 
gymnasts and figurantes. 

We have a field of vision : have we a field 
of thought ? Before referring to some mat- 



20 MECHANISM 

ters of iudividual experience, I would avail 
myself of Sir John Herschel's apology, that 
the nature of the subject renders such refer- 
ence inevitable ; as it is one that can only 
be elucidated by the individual's putting on 
record his own personal contribution to the 
stock of facts accumulating. 

Our conscious mental action, aside from 
immediate impressions on the senses, is mainly 
pictured, worded, or modulated, as in remem- 
bered music ; all, more or less, under the 
influence of the will. In a general way, we 
refer the seat of thinking to the anterior part 
of the head. Pictured thought is in relation 
with the field of vision, which I perceive — as 
others do, no doubt — as a transverse ellipse ; 
its vertical to its horizontal diameter about 
as one to three. We shut our eyes to recall 
a visible object : we see visions by night. 
The bright ellipse becomes a black ground, on 
Avliich ideal images show more distinctly than 
on the illuminated one. The form of the 
mental field of vision is illustrated by the 
fact, that we can follow in our idea a ship 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 21 

sailing, or a horse running, much farther, 
without a sense of effort, than we can a bal- 
loon rising. In seeing persons, this field of 
mental vision seems to be a little in front of 
the eyes. Dr. Howe kindly answers a letter 
of inquiry as follows : — 

" Most congenitally-blind persons, when 
asked with what part of the brain they 
think, answer, that they are not conscious of 
having any brain. 

" I have asked several of the most thought- 
ful and intelligent among our pupils to 
designate, as nearly as they can, the seat of 
sensation in thought ; and they do so by 
placing the hand upon the anterior and upper 
part of the cranium." 

Worded thought is attended with a distinct 
impulse towards the organs of speech : in 
fact, the effort often goes so far, that we 
" think aloud," as we say.^ The seat of 

^ The greater number of readers are probably 
in tbe habit of articulating the words mentally. 
Beginners read syllable by syllable. 

" A man must be a poor beast," said Dr. John- 



22 MECHANISM 

this form of mental action seems to me to be 
beneath that of pictured thought; indeed, 
to follow certain nerves downward : so that, 
as we say, " My heart was in my mouth," 

son, " that should read no more in quantity than 
he could utter aloud." There are books of which 
we can exhaust a page of its meaning at a glance ; 
hut a man cannot do justice to a poem like Gray's 
Elegy except by the distinct mental articulation 
of every word. Some persons read sentences and 
paragraphs as children read syllables ; taking their 
sense in block, as it were. All instructors who 
have had occasion to consult a text-book at the 
last moment before entering the lecture-room 
know that clairvoyant state well enough in which 
a page prints itself on their perception as the form 
of types stamped itself on the page. 

We can read aloud, or mentally articulate, and 
keep up a distinct train of pictured thought, — 
not so easily two currents of worded thought 
simultaneously : though this can be done to some 
extent ; as, for instance, one may be reading aloud, 
and internally articulating some weU-known pas- 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 23 

we could almost say, " My brain is my 
mouth." A particular spot has been of late 
pointed out by pathologists, not phrenologists, 
as the seat of the faculty of speech.^ I do 
know that our sensations ever point to it. 
Modulated or musical consciousness is to 
pictured and worded thought as algebra is 
to geometry and arithmetic. Music has an 
absolute sensuous significance — the wood- 
chuck which used to listen to my friend play- 
ing the piano I suppose stopped at that ; ^ — 
but for human beings it does not cause a mere 
sensation, nor an emotion, nor a definable 
intellectual state, though it may excite many 
various emotions and trains of worded or 
pictured thought. But words cannot truly 
define it: we might as well' give a man a 

^ A part of the left anterior lobe. — See Dr. 
Fisher's elaborate paper before referred to. 

^ For various alleged instances of the power 
of music over diiferent lower animals, — the cow, 
the stag, mice, serpents, spiders, — see Dwight's 
Journal of Music for Oct. 26, 1861. 



24 MECHANISM 

fiddle, and tell him to play the Ten Command- 
ments, as give him a dictionary, and tell him 
to describe the music of " Don Giovanni." 

The nerves of hearing clasp the roots of 
the brain as a creeping vine clings to the 
bole of an elm. The primary seat of musical 
consciousness seems to be behind and below 
that of worded thought ; but it radi.ites in all 
directions, calling up pictures and words, as 
I have said, in endless variety. Indeed, the 
various mental conditions I have described 
are so frequently combined, that it takes 
some trouble to determine the locality of 
each. 

The seat of the will seems to vary with 
the organ through which it is manifested; 
to transport itself to different parts of the 
brain, as we may wish to recall a picture, 
a phrase, or a melody ; to throw its force 
on the muscles or tlie intellectual processes. 
Like the general-in-chief, its place is any- 
where in the field of action. It is the least 
like an ir.strument of any of our faculties ; 
the farthest removed from our conceptions of 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 25 

mecliaiiism and matter, as we commonly de- 
fuie them. 

This is my parsimonious contribution to 
our knowledge of the relations existing be- 
tween mental action and space. Others may 
have had a different experience ; the great 
apostle did not know at one time whether he 
was in the body or out of the body : but 
my system of phrenology extends little be- 
3^ond this rudimentary testimony of con- 
sciousness. 

When it comes to the relation of mental 
action and time., we can say with Leibnitz, 
^^CalculewMS ;^^ for here we can reach quanti- 
tative results. The " personal equation," or 
difference in rapidity of recording the same 
occurrence, has been recognized in astronomi- 
cal records since the time of Maske]yne, the 
royal astronomer ; and is allowed for with tlie 
greatest nicety, as may be seen, for instance, 
in Dr. Gould's recent report on Transatlan- 
tic Longitude. More recently, the time re- 
quired in mental processes and in the trans- 
mission of sensation and the motor impulse 



26 MECHANISM 

along nerves has been carefully studied by 
Helmlioltz, Fizeau, Marey, Bonders, and 
others.^ From forty to eighty, a hundred or 
more feet a second are estimates of different 
observers : so that, as the newspapers have 
been repeating, it would take a whale a sec- 
ond, more or less, to feel the stroke of a har- 
poon in his tail.^ Compare this with the 
velocity of galvanic signals, which Dr. Gould 

^ See Annual of Scientific Discover?/ for 1851, 
1858, 1863, 1866 ; Journal of Anatomy and Phys- 
iologyj 2d Series, No. 1, for November, 1867 ; 
Marey, Du Mouvement dans les Fonctions de la 
Vie, p. 430 et seq. 

2 Mr. W. F. Barrett calculates, that as the 
mind requires one-tenth of a second to form a 
conception and act accordingly, and as a rifle- 
bullet would require no more than one-thousandth 
of a second to pass through the brain, it could not 
be felt {An. Sc. Discov., 1866-7, p. 278). When 
Cliarles XII. was struck dead by the cannon-ball, 
he clapped his hand on his sword. This, however, 
may have probably been an unconscious reflex 
action. 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 21 

has found to be from fourteen to eighteen 
thousand miles a second through iron wire 
on poles, and about sixty-seven hundred 
miles a second through the submarine cable. 
The brain, according to Fizeau, takes one- 
tenth of a second to transmit an order to the 
muscles ; and the muscles take one-hundredth 
of a second in getting into motion. These 
results, such as they- are, have been arrived 
at by experiments on single individuals with 
a very delicate chronometric apparatus. I 
have myself instituted a good many experi- 
ments with a more extensive and expensive 
machinery than I think has ever been em- 
ployed, — namely, two classes, each of ten 
intelligent students, who with joined hands 
represented a nervous circle of about sixty- 
six feet : so that a hand-pressure transmitted 
ten times round the circle traversed six hun- 
dred and sixty feet, besides involving on^ 
hundred perceptions and volitions. My 
chronometer was a " horse-timer," marking 
quarter-seconds. After some practice, my 
second class gradually reduced the time of 



28 MECHANISM 

transmission ten times round, whicli, like 
that of the first class, had stood at fourteen 
and fifteen seconds, down to ten seconds ; 
that is, one-tenth of a second for the passage 
through the nerves and brain of each individ- 
ual, — less than the least time I have ever 
seen assigned for the whole operation ; no 
more than Fizeau has assigned to the action 
of the brain alone. The mental process of 
judgment between colors (red, white, and 
green counters), between rough and smooth 
(common paper and sand-paper), between 
smells (camphor, cloves, and assafoetida), 
took about three and a half tenths of a second 
each ; taste, twice or three times as long, on 
account of the time required to reach the 
true sentient portion of the tongue.^ These 
few results of my numerous experiments 
show the rate of working of the different 

1 Some of these results assign 'a longer timo 
than other observers have found to be required. 
A little practice would materially shorten the time, 
as it did in the other experiment. 



IN TIIOUGTIT AND MORALS. 29 

parts of the machinery of consciousness. 
Nothing could be easier than to calculate the 
whole number of perceptions and ideas a 
man could have in the course of a lifetime.^ 

^ " The sensible points of the retina, according 
to Weber and Smith, measure no more than the 
¥0^0 "0 ^"^^ ^^ diameter. If, adopting the views of 
Mr. Solly, we consider the convolutions of the 
brain as made up of an- extensive surface of cine- 
ritious neurine, we may estimate the number of 
ideas, the substrata of which may be contained in 
a square inch, as not certainly less than 8,000 ; 
and, as there must be an immense number of 
square inches of surface in the gray matter ex- 
tended through the cerebro-spinal axis of man, 
there is space sufficient for millions." — On the Re- 
flex Function of the Brain, by T. Laycock, M.D. 
Brit, and For. Med. Revieiv for January, 1845. 

Dr. Hooke, the famous Englisli mathematician 
and philosopher, made a calculation of the number 
of separate ideas the mind is capable of entertain- 
ing, which he estimated as 3,155,760,000. — Hal- 
LER : Elementa Fhyslologioi, vol. v. p. 547. The 
nerve-cells of the brain vary in size fron ^^Vtt ^ 
3^jj of an inch in diameter (Marshall's Physiol- 



30 MECHANISM 

But as we think the same thing over many 
millions of times, and as many persons keep 
up their social relations by the aid of a vo- 
cabulary of only a few hundred words, or, 
in the case of some very fashionable people, 
a few scores only, a very limited amount of 
thinldng material may correspond to a full 
set of organs of sense, and a good develop- 
ment of the muscular system.^ 

ogy, i. 77) ; and the surface of the convolutions is 
reckoned by Baillarger at about 670 square inches 
(ibid., p. 302) ; which, with a depth of one-fifth of 
an inch, would give 134 cubic inches of cortical 
substance, and, if the cells average xoV(T of an inch, 
would allow room in the convolutions for 134,000,- 
000,000 cells. But they are mingled with white 
nerve-fibres and granules. While these calcula- 
tions illustrate the extreme complexity of the 
brain-substance, they are amusing rather than ex- 
planatory of mental phenomena, and belong to 
the province of Science moasseuse, to use the 
lively expression of a French academician at a 
recent session. 

^ The use of slang, or cheap generic terms, as a 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 31 

The time-relation of the sense of vision 
was illustrated by Newton by the familiar 

substitute for differentiated specific expressions, is 
at once a sign and a cause of mental atrophy. It 
is the way in which a lazy adult shifts the trouble 
of finding any exact meaning in his (or her) con- 
versation on the other party. If both talkers are 
indolent, all their talk lapses into the vague gen- 
eralities of early childhood, with the disadvantage 
of a vulgar phraseology. It is a prevalent social 
vice of the time, as it has been of times that 
are past. 

" Thus has he (and many more of the same breed, 
that, I know, the drossy age dotes on) only got the 
tune of the time, and outward habit of encounter ; 
a kind of yesty collection, whicli carries them 
through and through the most fond and winnowed 
opinions; and, do but blow them to their trial, 
the bubbles are out." — Havilet, act v. sc. 2. 

Swift says (in the character of Simon Wag- 
staff, Esq.), speaking of "witty sentences," "For, 
as long as my memory reaches, I do not recollect 
one new phrase of importance to have been added; 
which defect in us moderns I take to have been 
occasioned by the introduction of cant-words in 



32 MECHANISM 

experiment of whirling a burning brand, 
which appears as a circle of fire. The dura- 
tion of associated impressions on the memory 
differs vastly, as we all know, in different 
individuals. But, in uttering distinctly a 
teries of unconnected numbers or letters 
before a succession of careful listeners, I 
have beeii surprised to find how generally 
they break down, in trying to repeat them, 
between seven and ten figures or letters ; 
though here and there an individual may be 
depended on for a larger number. Pepys 
mentions a person who could repeat sixty 
unconnected words, forwards or backwards, 
and perform other wonderful feats of mem- 

the reign of King Chakles the Second." — A 
Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious 
Conversation^ «&;c. Introduction. 

"English is an expressive language." said INEr. 
Pinto, "but not difficult to master. Its range is 
limited. It consists, as far as I can observe, of 
four words, — ' nice,' ' joHj/ ' charming,' and 
^ bore ; ' and some grammarians add ' fond.' " — 
Lothair, chap, xxviii. 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 33 

oiy ; but this was a prodigy.^ I suspect we 
have in this and similar trials a very simple 
mental dynamometer which may yet find its 
place in education. 

fDo we ever think without knowing that 
we are thinking ? The question may be dis- 
guised so as to look a little less paradoxical. 
Are there any mental processes of which we 
are unconscious at the time, but which we 
recognize as having taken place by finding 
certain results in our minds ? ^ 

That there are such unconscious mental 
actions is laid down in the strongest terms 

^ This is nothing to the story told by Seneca 
of himself, and still more of a friend of his, one 
Fortius Latro (3Ie7idax, it might he suggested) ; 
or to that other relation of Muretus about a cei- 
tain young Corsican. — See Eees's Ci/clopcedia, 
art. Memonj ; also Haller's Mem. Phys., v. 548, 
&c. 

2 " Such a process of reasoning is more or less 
implicit, and witliout the direct and full advert- 
ence of the mind exei'cising it^ — J. H. New- 
man : Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent. 



34 'MECHANISM 

by Leibnitz, whose doctrine reverses the 
axiom of Descartes into sum^ ergo cogito. 
The existence of unconscious thought is 
maintained by him in terms we might fairly 
call audacious, and illustrated by some of the 
most striking facts bearing upon it. The 
" insensible perceptions," he says, are as im- 
portant in pneumatology as corpuscles are in 
physics, —fit does not follow, he says again, 
that, because we do not perceive thought, it 
does not exist.^) — Something goes on in the 
mind which answers to the circulation of 
the blood and all the internal movements of the 
viscera. — In one word, it is a great source of 
error to believe that there is no perception in 
the mind but those of which it is conscious. — 
This is surely a sufficiently explicit and 
peremptory statement of the doctrine, which, 
under the names of ''latent consciousness," 
" obscure perceptions," " the hidden soul," 
'' unconscious cerebration," " reflex action of 
the brain," has been of late years emerging 
into general recognition in treatises of psy- 
chology and physiology. 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 35 

His allusion to the circulation of the blood 
and the movements of the viscera, as illustrat- 
ing his paradox of thinking without know- 
ing it, shows that he saw the whole analogy 
of the mysterious intellectual movement with 
that series of reflex actions so fully described 
half a century later by Hartley, whose obser- 
vations, obscured by wrong interpretation of 
the cerebral structure, and an insufficient 
theory of vibrations which he borrowed from 
Newton, are yet a remarkable anticipation of 
many of the ideas of modern physiology, for 
which credit has been given so liberally to 
Unzer and Prochaska. Unconscious activity 
is the rule with the actions most important 
to life. The lout who lies stretched on the 
tavern-bench, with just mental activity enough 
to keep his pipe from going out, is the uncon- 
scious tenant of a laboratory where such 
combinations are being constantly made as 
never Wohler or Berthelot could put to- 
gether ; where such fabrics are woven, such 
colors dyed, such problems of mechanism 
solved, such a commerce carried on with the 



36 MECHANISM 

elements and forces of the outer universe, 
that the industries of all the factories and 
trading establishments in the world are mere 
indolence and awkwardness and unproduc- 
tiveness compared to the miraculous activities 
of which his lazy bulk is the unheeding cen- 
tre. All these unconscious or reflex actions 
take place by a mechanism never more simply 
stated than in the words of Hartley, as ^ vi- 
brations wliich ascend up tlie sensory nerves 
first, and then are detached down the motory 
nerves, which communicate with these by 
some common trunk, plexus, or ganglion." ^ 



^ He goes on to draw the distinction between 
" automatic motions of the secondary kind " and 
those which were originally automatic. " The 
fingers of young children bend upon almost every 
impression which is made upon the palm of the 
hand ; thus performing the action of grasping in 
the original automatic manner." ("He rastled 
with my finger, the blank little etc. ! " says the 
hard -swearing but tender-hearted "Kentuck," 
speaking of the new-born babe whose story Mr. 
Harte has told so touchingly in "The Luck'of 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 37 

The doctrine of Leibnitz, that the brain may 
sometimes act without our taking cognizance 
of it, as the heart commonly does, as many 
internal organs always do, seems almost to 
belong to our time. The readers of Hamil- 
ton and Mill, of Abercrombie, Laycock, and 
Maudsley, of Sir John Herschel, of Carpen- 
ter, of Lecky, of Dallas, will find many vari- 
ations on the text of Leibnitz, some new 
illustrations, a new classification and nomen- 
clature of the facts ; but the root of the 
matter is all to be found in his writings. 

Koaring Camp.") Hartley traces this famiHar 
nursery experience onwards, until the original 
automatic action becomes associated with sensa- 
tions and ideas, and by and by subject to the vvill ; 
and shows still further how this and similar ac- 
tions, by innumerable repetitions, reach another 
stage, " repassing through the same degrees in 
an inverted order, till they become secondarily 
automatic on many ocasions, though still perfectly 
voluntary on some ; viz., whensoever an express act 
of the will is exerted." — Ohs. on Man : Froi^o- 
sitions xix. xxi. 



38 MECHANISM 

I will give some instances of work done in 
the undergTound Avorkshop of thought, — 
some of them familiar to the readers of the 
authors just mentioned. 

(We wish to remember something in the 
course of conversation. No effort of the will 
can reach it ; but we say, '' Wait a minute, 
and it Avill come to me," and go on talking. 
Presently, perhaps some minutes later, the 
idea we are in search of comes all at once into 
the mind, delivered like a prepaid bundle, 
laid at the door of consciousness like a found- 
ling in a basket. How it came there we know 
not. The mind must have been at work 
groping and feeling for it in the dark: it 
cannot have come of itself. Yet, all the 
while, our consciousness, so far as we are 
conscious of our consciousness, was busy 
with other thoughts. 

In old persons, there is sometimes a long 
interval of obscure mental action before the 
answer to a question is evolved. I remember 
making an inquiry, of an ancient man whom 
I met on the road in a wacron with his 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 39 

daughter, about a certain old burial-ground 
wliicli I was visiting. He seemed to listen 
attentively ; but I got no answer. " Wait 
half a minute or so," the daughter said, " and 
he will tell you." And sure enough, after 
a little time, he answered me, and to the 
point. The delay here, probably, corre- 
sponded to what machinists call " lost time," 
or ''back lash," in turning an old screw, the 
thread of which is worn. But, within a 
fortnight, I examined a young man for his 
degree, in whom I noticed a certain regular 
interval, and a pretty long one, between 
every question and its answer. Yet the 
answer was, in almost every instance, cor- 
rect, when at last it did come. It was an 
idiosyncrasy, I found, which his previous in- 
structors had noticed. I do not think the 
mind knows what it is doing in the interval, 
in such cases. This latent period, during 
which the brain is obscurely at work, may, 
perhaps, belong to mathematicians more than 
others. Swift said of Sir Isaac Newton, that, 
if one were to ask him a question, " he would 



40 MECHANISM 

revolve it in a circle in his brain, round and 
round and round " (the narrator here de- 
scribing a circle on his OAvn forehead), " be- 
fore he could produce an answer." ^) 

1 have often spoken of the same trait in a 
distinguished friend of my own, remarkable 
fo! his mathematical genius, and compared 
his sometimes long-deferred answer to a ques- 
tion, with half a dozen others stratified over 
it, to the thawing-out of the frozen words as 
told of b}^ Baron Munchausen and Rabelais, 
and nobody knows how many others before 
them. 

I was told, within a week, of a business-man 
in Boston, who, liaving an important questioij 
under consideration, had given it up for the 
time as too much for him. But he was con- 
scious of an action going on in his brain 
which was so unusual and painful as to excite 
his apprehensions that he was threatened with 
palsy, or something of that sort. After some 
hours of tliis uneasiness, his perplexity was 

* Note to "A Voyage to Laputa." 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 41 

all at once cleared up by the natural solution 
of his doubt coming to him, — worked out, 
as he believed, in that obscnre and troubled 
interval. 

The cases are numerous where questions 
have been answered, or problems solved, in 
dreams, or during unconscious sleep. Two of 
our most distinguished professors in this insti- 
tution have had such, an experience, as they 
tell me ; and one of them has often assured me 
that he never dreams. Somnambulism and 
double-consciousness offer another series of 
illustrations. Many of my audience remem- 
ber a murder-case, where the accused was suc- 
cessfully defended, on the ground of somnam- 
bulism, by one of the most brilliant of Ameri- 
can lawyers. In the year 1686, a brother of 
Lord Culpeper was indicted at the Old Bailey 
for shooting one of the guards, and accpiitted 
on the same ground of somnam^bulism ; that is, 
an unconscious, and therefore irresponsible, 
state of activity. 1 

^ Dallas : The Gay Science, i. 324. 



42 MECHANISM 

A more familiar instance of unconscious ac- 
tion is to be found in what we call " absent " 
persons, — those who, while wide awake, act 
with an apparent purpose, but without really 
knowing what they are doing ; as in La 
Bruyere's character, who threw his glass of 
wine into the backgammon-board, and swal- 
lowed the dice-. 

There are a vast number of movements 
which we perform with perfect regularity 
while we are thinking of something quite dif- 
ferent, — "automatic actions of the secondary 
kind," as Hartley calls them, and of which 
he gives various examples. The old woman 
knits ; the young woman stitches, or perhaps 
plays her piano, and yet talks away as if noth- 
ing but her tongue was busy. Two lovers 
stroll along side by side, just born into the 
rosy morning of their new life, prattling the 
sweet follies worth all the Avisdom that years 
will ever bring them. How much do they 
think about that wonderful problem of bal- 
anced progression which they solve anew at 
every step ? 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 43 

We are constantly finding results of unper- 
ceived mental processes in our consciousness. 
Here is a striking instance, which I borrow 
from a recent number of an English jour- 
nal. It relates to what is considered the 
most interesting period of incubation in Sir 
William Rowan Hamilton's discovery of qua- 
ternions. The time was the 15th of October, 
1843. On that day, he says in a letter to a 
friend, he was walking from his observatory 
to Dublin with Lady Hamilton, when, on 
reaching Brougham Bridge, he " felt the 
galvanic circle of thought close ; and the 
sparks that fell from it were the fundamental 
relations between i, j, k," just as he used 
them ever afterwards.^ 

Still another instance of the spontaneous 
evolution of thought Ave may find in the ex- 
perience of a great poet. When Goethe shut 
his eyes, and pictured a flower to hirnself, he 
says that it developed itself before him in 

1 Nature, Feb. 7, 1870, p. 407 ; North British 
Review, September, 1866, p. 57. 



44 MECHANISM 

leaves and blossoms.^ The result of the 
mental process appeared as pictured thought , 
but the process itself was automatic and 
imperceptible. 

There are thoughts that never emerge into 
consciousness, which yet make their influence 
felt among the perceptible mental currents, 
just as the unseen planets sway the move- 
ments of those which are watched and mapped 
by the astronomer. Old prejudices, that are 
ashamed to confess themselves, nudge our 
talking thought to utter their magisterial 
veto. In hours of languor, as ^Ir. Lecky 
lias remarked, the beliefs and fancies of ob- 
solete conditions are apt to take advantage 
of us.^ We know very little of the contents 
of our minds until some sudden jar brings 
them to light, as an earthquake that shakes 
down a miser's house brings out the old 
stockings full of gold, and all the hoards 
tliat have hid away in holes and crannies. 

^ Miiller's rhysiology (Baly's translation), vol. 
ii. p. 1364. 

^ History of E-ationalisni; ii. 96, note. 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 45 

We not rarely find our personality doubled 
in our dreams, and do battle with ourselves, 
unconscious that we are our own antagonists. 
Dr. Johnson dreamed that he had a contest 
of wit with an opponent, and got the worst 
of it : of course, he furnished the wit for both. 
Tartini heard the Devil play a wonderful so- 
nata, and set it down on awaking. Who was 
the Devil but Tartini himself ? I remember, 
in my youth, reading verses in a dream, writ- 
ten, as I thought, by a rival fledgling of the 
Muse. They were so far beyond my powers, 
that I despaired of equalling them ; yet I 
must have made them unconsciously as I 
read them. Could I only have remembered 
them waking ! 

But I must here add another personal ex- 
perience, of which I will say beforehand, — 
somewhat as honest Izaak Walton said of his 
pike, " This dish of meat is too good for any 
but anglers or very honest men," — this 
story is good only for philosophers and very 
small children. I will merely hint to the 
former class of thinkers, that its moral bears 



46 MECHANISM 

on two points: first, the value of our self- 
estimate, sleeping, — possibly, also, waking; 
secondly, the significance of general formulae 
when looked at in certain exalted mental 
conditions. 

I once inhaled a pretty full dose of ether, 
with the determination to put on record, at 
the earliest moment of regaining conscious- 
ness, the thought I should find uppermost 
in my mind. The mighty music of the tri- 
umphal march into nothingness reverberated 
through my brain, and filled me Avith a sense 
of infinite possibilities, which made' me an 
archangel for the moment. The veil of eter- 
nity was lifted. The one great truth which 
underlies all human experience, and is the 
key to all the mysteries that philosophy has 
sought in vain to solve, flashed upon me in a 
sudden revelation. Henceforth all was clear : 
a few words had lifted my intelligence to the 
level of the knowledge of the cherubim. As 
my natural condition returned, I remembered 
my resolution ; and, staggering to my desk, I 
wrote, in ill-shaped, straggling characters, the 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 47 

all-embracing truth still glimmering in my 
consciousness. The words were these (chil- 
dren may smile ; the wise will ponder) : " vl 
strong smell of turpentine prevails throughout.'''' ^ 
My digression has served at least to illus- 
trate the radical change which a slight mate- 
rial cause may produce in our thoughts, and 
the way we think about them. If the state 
just described were prolonged, it would be 
called insanity.^ I have no doubt that there 

^ Sir Humphry Davy has related an experi- 
ence, which I liad forgotten when I recorded my 
own. After inhahng nitrous-oxide gas, he says, 
" With the most intense belief and prophetic man- 
ner, I exclaimed to Dr. Kingslake, 'Nothing exists 
but thoughts. The universe is composed of im- 
pressions, ideas, pleasures, and pains.'" — Works, 
London, 1839, vol. iii. p. 290. 

^ AVe are often insane at the moment of awak- 
ing from sleep. " ' I have desired Apronia to be 
always careful, especially about the legs.' Tray, do 
you see any such great wit in that sentence ? I 
must freely own that I do not. Tray, read it over 
again, and consider it. Why • — ay — you must 



48 MECHANISM 

arc many ill-organized, perhaps over-organ- 
ized, human brains, to which the common air 
is what the vapor of ether was to mine : it is 
madness to them to drink in this terrible 
burning oxygen at every breatli ; and the 
atmosphere that infolds them is like the 
flaming shirt of Nessus. 

The more we examine the mechanism of 
thought, tlie more we shall see that tlie auto- 
matic, unconscious action of the mind enters 
largely into all its processes. Our definite 

know that I dreamed it just now, and waked with 
it in my mouth. Are you bit, or are you not, 
sirrahs ? " — Swift's Journal to Stella, Letter 

XV. 

Even when wide awake, so keen and robust a 
mind as Swift's was capable of a strange moment- 
ary aberration in the days of its full vigor. "'I 
have my mouth full of water, and was going to spit 
it out, because I reasoned witli myself, ' How could 
I write when my mouth was full ? ' Have ^^'ou not 
done things like that, — reasoned wrong at first 
thinking ? " — Ibid., Letter viii. 

All of us must have had similar experiences. 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 49 

ideas are stepping-stones ; how we get from 
one to the other, we do not know : something 
carries us ; we do not take the step. A cre- 
ating and informing spirit which is with us, 
and not of us, is recognized everywhere in 
real and in storied life. It is the Zeus that 
kindled the rage of Achilles ; it is the Muse 
of Homer ; it is the Daimon of Socrates ; it 
is the inspiration of the seer ; it is the mock- 
ing devil that whispers to IMargaret as she 
kneels at the altar ; and the hobgoblin that 
cried, "Sell him, sell him!" in the ear of 
John Bunyan : it shaped the forms that filled 
the soul of Michael Angelo when he saw the 
figure of the great Lawgiver in tlie yet un- 
hewn marble, and the dome of the world's 
yet unbuilt basilica against the blank hori- 
zon ; it comes to the least of us, as a voice 
that will be heard ; it tells us what we must 
believe ; it frames our sentences ; it lends a 
sudden gleam of sense or eloquence to the 
dullest of us all, so that, like Katterfelto 
with his hair on end, we wonder at ourselves, 
or rather not at ourselves, but at this divine 

4 



50 MECHANISM 

visitor, who chooses our brain as his dwell 
ing-place, and invests our naked thought 
with the purple of the kings of speech or 
song. 

After all, the mystery of unconscious 
mental action is exemplified, as I have said, 
in every act of mental association. What 
happens when one idea brings up another ? 
Some internal movement, of which we are 
wholly unconscious, and which we only 
know . by its effect. What is this action, 
which in Dame Quickly agglutinates contigu- 
ous circumstances by their surfaces; in men 
of wit and fancy, connects remote ideas by 
partial resemblances ; in men of imagination, 
by the vital identity which underlies phenom- 
enal diversity ; in the man of science, groups 
the objects of thought in sequences of maxi- 
mum resemblance ? Not one of them can 
answer. There is a Delphi and a Pythoness 
in every human breast. 

The poet sits down to his desk with an odd 
conceit in his brain ; and presently his eyes 
fill with tears, his thought slides into the 



IX THOUGHT AND MORALS. 51 

minor key, and his heart is full of sad 
and plaintive melodies. Or he goes to his 
work, saying, "To-night I would have 
tears; " and, before he rises from his table, he 
has written a burlesque, such as he might 
think fit to send to one of the comic papers, 
if these were not so commonly cemeteries of 
hilarity interspersed with cenotaphs of wit 
and humor. These strange hysterics of the 
intelligence, which make us pass from weep- 
ing to laughter, and from laughter back again 
to weeping, must be familiar to every im- 
pressible nature ; and all is as automatic, 
involuntary, as entirely self-evolved by a hid- 
den organic process, as are the changing 
moods of the laughing and crying woman. 
The poet always recognizes a dictation ah 
extra; and we hardly think it a figure 
of speech when we talk of his inspira- 
tion. 

The mental attitude of the poet while writ- 
ing, if I may venture to define it, is that of 
the " nun, breathless with adoration." Men- 
tal stillness is the first condition of the listen- 



62 MECHANISM 

ing state ; and I think ray friends the poets 
will recognize that the sense of effort, which 
is often felt, accompanies the mental spasm 
by which the mind is maintained in a state at 
once passive to the influx from without, and 
active in seizing only that which will serve 
its purpose.^ It is not strange that remem- 

^ Burns tells us how he composed verses for a 
given tune : — 

^' My way is, I consider the poetic sentiment 
correspondent to my idea of the musical expres- 
sion ; then choose my theme ; begin one stanza. 
When that is composed, which is generally the 
most difficult part of the business, I walk out, sit 
down now and then, look out for objects in Nature 
that are in unison or harmony with the cogitations 
of my fancy, and workings of my bosom ; hum- 
ming every now and then the air with the verses 
I have framed. When I feel my Muse beginning 
to jade, I retire to the solitary fireside of my 
study, and there commit my effusions to paper; 
swinging at intervals on the hind-legs of my 
elbow-chair, by way of calling forth my ovm criti- 
cal strictures, as my pen goes on." — -Letters to G. 
Thoinsoii, No. xxxvii. 



IN TIIOUGnr AND MORALS. 53 

bered ideas should often take advantage of 
the crowd of thoughts, and smuggle them- 
selves in as original. Honest thinkers are 
always stealing unconsciously from each 
other. Our minds are full of waifs and es- 
trays which we think are our own. Inno- 
cent plagiarism turns up everywhere. Our 
best musical critic tells me that a few notes 
of the air of '' Shoo Fly " are borrowed from 
a movement in one of the magnificent har- 
monies of Beethoven.^ 

^ One or two instances where the same idea is 
found in different authors may be worth mention- 
ing in illustration of the remark just made. We 
are familiar with the saying, that the latest days 
are the old age of the world. 

Mr. Lewes finds this in Lord Bacon's writings, 
in Roger Bacon's also, and traces it back as far as 
Seneca. I find it in Pascal (Preface sur le Traite 
du Vide) ; and Ilobbes says, " If we will reverence 
the ages, the present is the oldest." So, too. Ten* 
nyson : — 

" For we arc ancients of the earth, 
And in the morning of the times." 

The Day-Dream : U Envoi 



54 MECHANISM 

And SO the orator, — I do not mean the 
poor slave of a manuscript, who takes his 
thought chilled and stiffened from its mould, 
but the impassioned speaker who pours it 

Here are several forms of another familiar 
thought : — 

" And what if all of animated nature 
Be but organic harps diversely framed, 
That tremble into thought as o'er them sweeps, 
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, 
At once the soul of each, and God of all ? " 

CoLEKiDGE : The jEolian Harp. 

" Are we a piece of machinery, which, like the 
^olian harp, passive, takes the impression of the 
passing accident ? " — Burns to Mrs. Dunlop : 
Letter 148. 

" Un seul esprit, qui est universel et qui anime 
tout I'univers, — comme un meme souffle de vent 
fait sonner differemment divers tuyaux d'orgue." — 
Leibnitz : Considerations sur la Doctrine d^un Es- 
prit Universel. 

Literature is full of such coincidences, which 
some love to believe plagiarisms. There are 
thoughts always abroad in the air, which it takes 
more wit to avoid than to hit upon, as the solitary 
"Address without a Phoenix " may remind those 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 55 

forth as it flows coruscating from the fur- 
nace, — the orator only becomes our mas- 
ter at the moment when he himself is sui'- 
prised, captured, taken possession of, by a 
sudden rush of fresh inspiration. How well 

critical ant-eaters whose aggressive feature is drawn 
to too fine a point. 

Old stories reproduce themselves in a singular 
way. — not only in such authors as Mr. Joseph 
Miller, hut among those whom we cannot for a 
moment suspect of conscious misappropriation. 
Here is an instance forced upon my attention. 
In the preface to " The Guardian Angel," I 
quoted a story from Sprague's " Annals of the 
American Pulpit," which is there spoken of as 
being told, by Jonathan Edwards the younger, of a 
brutal fellow in New Haven. Some one found a 
similar story in a German novel, and mentioned 
the coincidence. The true original, to which I 
was directed by Dr. Elam's book, " A Physician's 
Problems," is to be found in the seventh chapter 
of the seventh book of Aristotle's Ethics. My 
Latin version renders it thus : " Et qui a filio tra- 
hebatur trahendi finem jubebat ad foreis, nam a se 
quoque ad hunc locum patrem suum tractum esse." 



56 MECHANISM 

we know the flash of the eye, the thrill 
of the voice, which are the signature and 
symbol of nascent thought, — thought just 
emerging into consciousness, in which con- 
dition, as is the case with the chemist's ele- 
ments, it has a combining force at other times 
wholly unknown ! 

But we are all more or less improvisators. 
We all have a double, who is wiser and 
better than we are, and who puts thoughts 
into our heads, and words into our mouths. 
Do we not all commune with our own hearts 
upon our beds ? Do we not all divide our- 
selves, and go to buffets on questions of right 
or wrong, of wisdom or folly? Who or 
what is it that resolves the stately parliament 
of the day, with all its forms and convention- 
alities and pretences, and the great Me presid- 
ing, into the committee of the whole, with 
Conscience in the chair, that holds its solemn 
session through the watches of the night ? 

Persons who talk most do not always think 
most. I question Avhether persons who think 
most — that is, have most conscious thought 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 57 

pass through their minds — necessarily do 
most mental work. The tree you are stick- 
ing in " will be growing when you are sleep- 
ing." So with every new idea that is planted 
in a real thinker's mind : it will be growing 
when he is least conscious of it. An idea in 
the brain is not a legend carved on a marble 
slab : it is an impression made on a living 
tissue, which is the seat of active nutritive 
processes. Shall the initials I carved in bark 
increase from year to year with the tree ? and 
shall not my recorded thought develop into 
new forms and relations with my growing 
brain ? Mr. Webster told one of our greatest 
scholars that he had to change the size of 
his hat every few years. His head grew 
larger as his intellect expanded. Illustra- 
tions of this same fact were shown me many 
years ago by Mr. Deville, the famous phre- 
nologist, in London. But organic mental 
changes may take place in shorter spaces of 
time. A single night of sleep has often 
brought a sober second-thought, which was a 
surprise to the hasty conclusion of the day 



58 MECHANISM 

before. Lord Polkommet's description of 
the way he prepared himself for a judicial 
decision is in point, except for the alcoholic 
fertilizer he employed in planting his ideas : 
" Ye see, I first read a' the pleadings ; and 
then, after letting them wamble in my wame 
wi' the toddy two or three days, I gie my ain 
interlocutor." ^ 

Tlie counterpart of this slow process is 
found in the ready, spontaneous, automatic, 
self-sustaining, continuous flow of thought, 
well illustrated in a certain form of dialogue, 
which seems to be in a measure peculiar to 
the female sex. The sternest of our sisters 
will, I hope, forgive me for telling the way 
in which this curious fact was forced upon 
my notice. 

I was passing through a somewhat obscure 
street at the west end of our city a year or 
two since, when my attention was attracted 
to a narrow court by a sound of voices and a 

* Dean Kamsay's Beminiscences of Scottish 
Life and Character, p. 126. 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 59 

small crowd of listeners. From two open 
windows on the opposite sides of the court 
projected the heads, and a considerable por- 
tion of the persons, of two of the sex in 
question, — natives, both of them, apparently, 
of the green isle famous for shamrocks and 
shillalahs. They were engaged in argument, 
if that is argument in which each of the 
two parties develops -his proposition without 
the least regard to what the other is at the 
same time sajdng. The question involved 
was the personal, social, moral, and, in short, 
total standing and merit of the two contro- 
versialists and their respective families. But 
the strange phenomenon was this : The 
two women, as if by preconcerted agreement, 
like two instruments playing a tune in 
unison, were pouring forth simultaneously 
a calm, steady, smooth-flowing stream of 
mutual undervaluation, to apply a mild 
phrase to it ; never stopping for punctuation, 
and barely giving themselves time to get 
breath between its long-drawn clauses. The 
dialogue included every conceivable taunt 



60 MECHANISM 

which might rouse the fury of a sensitive 
mother of a family, whose allegiance to her 
lord, and pride in her offspring, were points 
Avliich it displeased her to have lightly 
handled. I stood and listened like the quiet 
groups in the more immediate neighborhood. 
I looked for some explosion of violence, for 
a screaming volley of oaths, for an hysteric 
burst of tears, perhaps for a missile of more 
questionable character than an epithet aimed 
at the head and shoulders projecting opposite. 
" At any rate," I thought, " their tongues will 
soon run down ; for it is not in human nature 
that such a flow of scalding rhetoric can be 
kept up very long." But I stood waiting 
until I was tired ; and, with lahitur et lahetur 
on my lips, I left them pursuing the even 
tenor, or treble, of their way in a duet 
which seemed as if it might go on until 
nightfall. 

I came away thinking I had discovered a 
new national custom, as peculiar, and proba- 
bly as limited, as the Corsican vendetta. But 
I have since found that the same scolding 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 61 

duets take place between the women in an 
African kraal. A couple of them will thrust 
their bodies half out of their huts, and 
exhaust the vocabulary of the native Wor- 
cester and Webster to each other's detriment, 
while the bystanders listen with a sympathy 
which often leads to a general disturbance.^ 
And I find that Homer was before us all in 
noticing this curious logomachy of the un- 
warlike sex. iEneas says to Achilles after 
an immensely long-winded discourse, which 
Creiisa could hardly have outdone, — 

" Bat why in wordy and contentious strife 
Need we each other scold, as women use, 
Who, with some heart-consuming anger wroth. 
Stand in the street, and call each other names. 
Some true, some false ; for so their rage commands ? " ^ 

^ Uncivilized Races of Men. By Rev. J. G. 
Wood. Vol. i. p. 213. 

^ Iliad, XX. 251-255. And Tennyson speaks of 

" Those detestable 
That let the bantling scald at home, and brawl 
Their rights or wrongs like pot-herbs in the street." 

The Princess, 323. 



62 MECHANISM 

I confess that the recollection of the two 
women, drifting upon their vocabularies as 
on a shoreless ocean, filled me at first with 
apprehension as to the possible future of our 
legislative assemblies. But, in view of what 
our own sex accomplishes in the line of 
mutual vituperation, perhaps the feminine 
arrangement, by which the two save time 
by speaking at once, and it is alike impossible 
for either to hear the other, and for the audi- 
ence to hear them both, might be considered 
an improvement. 

The automatic flow of thought is often 
singularly favored by the fact of listening 
to a weak, continuous discourse, . with just 
enough ideas in it to keep the mind busy on 
somethinix else. The induced current of 
thought is often rapid and brilliant in the 
inverse ratio of the force of the inducing cur- 
rent. 

The vast amount of blood sent to the 
brain implies a corresponding amount of 
material activity in the organ. In point of 
fact, numerous experiments have shown (and 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 63 

I may refer particularly to those of our own 
countrymen, — Professors Flint, Hammond, 
and Lombard) that the brain is the seat of 
constant nutritive changes, Avhich are greatly 
increased by mental exertion. 

The mechanical co-efficient of mental ac- 
tion may be therefore considered a molecular 
movement in the nervous centres, attended 
with waste of material conveyed thither in 
the form of blood, — not a mere tremor like 
the quiver of a bell, but a process more like 
combustion ; the blood carrying off the oxi- 
dated particles, and bringing in fresh matter 
to take their place. 

This part of the complex process must, of 
course, enter into the category of the corre- 
lated forces. The brain must be fed in 
order to work ; and according to the amount 
of waste of materialwill be that of the food 
required to repair losses. So much logic, so 
much beef ; so much poetry, so much pud- 
ding: and, as we all know that all growing 
tilings are but sponges soaked full of old 



64 MECHANISM 

sunshine, Apollo becomes as important in the 
world of letters as ever.^ 

But the intellectual product does not 
belong to the category of force at all, as de- 
fined by physicists. It does not answer their 
definition as " that which is expended in 
producing or resisting motion." It is not 
reconvertible into other forms of force. One 
cannot lift a weight Avith a logical demon- 
stration, or make a tea-kettle boil by writing 
an ode to it. A given amount of molecular 
action in two brains represents a certain 
equivalent of food, but by no means an 
equivalent of intellectual product. Bavins 
and Msevius were very probably as good 
feeders as Virgil and Horace, and wasted as 
much brain-tissue in producing their carmina 
as the two great masters wasted in producing 
theirs. It may be doubted whether the 
present Laureate of England consumed more 

^ It is curious to compcare the Laputan idea 
of extracting sunbeams from cucumbers with 
George Stephenson's famous saying about coal. 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. Q>^ 

oxidable material in the shape of nourish- 
ment for every page of " Maud " or of "In 
Memoriam " than his predecessor Nahum 
Tate, Avhose masterpiece gets no better 
eulogy than that it is " the least miserable 
of his productions," in eliminating an equal 
amount of verse. ^ 

As mental labor, in distinction from the 
passive flow of thought, implies an exercise 
of will, and as mental labor is shown to be 
attended by an increased waste, the pre- 

^ " Sur un meme papier, avec la meme plume et 
la meme encre, en remnant tant soit pen le bout 
de la plume en certaine fa9on, vous tracez des 
lettres qui font imaginer des combats, des tempetes 
on des furies a cenx qui les lisent, et qui les rendent 
indignes ou tristes ; an lieu que si vous remnez la 
plume d'une autre fagou presque semblable, la seule 
difference qui sera en ce pen de mouvemeiit 
leur pent donner des pensees tontes contraires, 
com me de paix, de repos, de douceur, et exciter 
en eux des passions d'amour et de joie." — Des^- 
CARTES : Principes de Fhilosophidj 4eme Partie, 
§197. 

5 



66 MECHANISM 

sumption is that this waste is in some degree 
referable to the material requirements of the 
act of volition. We see why the latter 
should be attended by a sense of effort, and 
followed by a feeling of fatigue. 

A question is suggested by the definition 
of the physicists. What is that which 
changes the form of force ? Electricity leaves 
what we call magnetism in iron, after passing 
through it : what name shall we give to that 
virtue in iron which causes the force we 
know as electricity thus to manifest itself by 
a precipitate, so to speak, of new properties ? 
Why may we not speak of a vis ferrea as 
causing the change in consequence of 
which a bar through which an electrical cur- 
rent has flowed becomes capable of attracting 
iron and of magnetizing a million other bars ? 
And so why may not a particular brain, 
through which certain nutritious currents 
have flowed, fix a force derived from these 
currents in virtue of a vis Platonica or a vis 
Baconica, and thus become a magnet in the 
universe of thought, exercising and imparting 



IN TnOUGIIT AND MORALS. 67 

an influence which is not expended, in addi- 
tion to that accounted for by the series of 
molecular changes in the thinking organ ? 

We must not forget that force-equivalent 
is one thing, and quality of force-product is 
quite a different thing. The same outlay of 
muscular exertion turns the winch of a 
coffee-mill and of a hand-organ. It has been 
said that thought cannot be a physical force, 
because it cannot be measured. An attempt 
has been made to measure thought as we 
measure force. I have two tables, one from 
the "Annales Encyclopddiques," and another, 
earlier and less minute, by the poet Akenside, 
in which the poets are classified according to 
their distinctive qualities; each quality and 
the total average being marked on a scale of 
twenty as a maximum. I am not sure that 
mental qualities are not as susceptible of 
measurement as the aurora borealis or the 
changes of the weather. But even measura- 
ble quality has no more to do with the 
correlation of forces than the color of a 
horse with his power of draught ; and it is 



68 MECHANISM 

with quality we more especially deal in in- 
tellect and morals. 

I have spoken of the material or physio- 
logical co-efficient of thought as being indis- 
pensable for its exercise during the only 
condition of existence of which, apart from 
any alleged spiritualistic experience, we have 
any personal knowledge. We know our 
dependence too well from seeing so many 
gallant and well-freighted minds towed in 
helpless after a certain time of service, — 
razees at sixty, dismantled at seventy, going 
to pieces and sinking at fourscore. We 
recognize in ourselves the loss of mental 
power, slight or serious, from grave or tri- 
fling causes. " Good God," said Swift, 
" what a genius I had when I Avrote that 
book ! " And I remember that an ingenious 
tailor of the neighboring city, on seeing a 
customer leave his shop without purchasing, 
exclaimed, smiting his forehead, "If it had 
not been for this — emphatically character- 
ized — headache, I'd have had a coat on that 
man before he'd got out over my doorstep." 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 69 

Such is the delicate adjustment of the intel- 
lectual apparatus by the aid of which we 
clothe our neighbor, whether he will or no, 
with our thoughts if we are writers of books, 
with our garments if we are artificers of 
habiliments. 

The problem of memory is closely con- 
nected with the question of the mechanical 
relation between thought and structure. How 
intimate is the alliance of memory with the 
material condition of the brain, is shown by 
the effect of age, of disease, of a blow, of 
intoxication. 1 have Imown an aged person 
repeat the same question five, six, or seven 
times during the same brief visit. Every- 
body knows the archbishop's flavor of apo- 
plexy in the memory as in the other mental 
powers. I was once asked to see to a woman 
who had just been injured in the street. On 
coming to herself, " Where am I ? what 
has happened ? " she asked. " Knocked 
down by a horse, ma'am ; stunned a little : 
that is all." A pause, " while one with 
moderate haste might count a hundred ; " 



70 MECHANISM 

and then again, " Where am I ? what has 
happened ? " — " Knocked down by a horse, 
ma'am ; stunned a little : that is all." An- 
other pause, and the same question again ; 
and so on during the whole time I was by 
her. The same tendency to repeat a ques- 
tion mdefinitely has been observed in return- 
ing members of those worshipping assemblies 
whose favorite hymn is, '' We won't go home 
till morning." 

Is memory, then, a material record ? Is 
the brain, like the rocks of the Sinaitic 
Valley, written all over with inscriptions left 
by the long caravans of thought, as they 
have passed year after year through its 
mysterious recesses ? 

When we see a distant railway-train slid- 
ing by us in the same line, day after day, we 
infer the existence of a track which guides 
it. So, when some dear old friend begins 
that story we remember so well ; switching 
off at the accustomed point of digression ; 
coming to a dead stop at the puzzling ques- 
tion of chronology ; off the track on the 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 71 

matter of its being first or second cousin of 
somebody's aunt ; set on it again by the 
patient, listening wife, who knows it all as she 
knows her well-worn wedding-ring, — how 
can we doubt that there is a track laid down 
for the story in some permanent disposition 
of the thinking-marrow ? 

I need not say that no microscope can find 
the tablet inscribed with the names of early 
loves, the stains left by tears of sorrow or 
contrition, the rent where the thunderbolt of 
passion has fallen, or any legible token that 
such experiences have formed a part of the 
life of the mortal, the vacant temple of whose 
thought it is exploring. It is only as an 
inference, aided by an illustration which I 
will presently offer, that I suggest the possi- 
ble existence, in the very substance of the 
brain-tissue, of those inscriptions which 
Shakspeare must have thought of when he 
wrote, — 

" Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow ; 
Raze out the written troubles of the brain." 

The objection to the existence of such a 



72 MECHANISM 

material record — that we renew our bodies 
many scores of times, and yet retain our 
earliest recollections — is entirely met by the 
fact, that a scar of any kind holds its own 
pretty nearly through life in spite of all 
these same changes, as we have not far to 
look to find instances. 

It must be remembered that a billion of 
the starry brain -cells could be packed in 
a cubic inch, and that the convolutions 
contain one hundred and thirty-four cubic 
inches, according to the estimate already 
given. My illustration is derived from mi- 
croscopic photography. I have a glass slide 
on which is a minute photographic picture, 
which is exactly covered when the head 
of a small pin is laid upon it. In that little 
speck are clearly to be seen, by a proper 
magnifying power, the following objects : the 
Declaration of Independence, with easily-rec- 
ognized facsimile autographs of all the sign- 
ers ; the arms of all the original thirteen 
States ; the Capitol at Washington ; and very 
good portraits of all the Presidents of the 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 73 

• United States from Washington to Mr. James 
K. Polk. These objects are all distinguisha- 
ble as a group with a power of fifty diame- 
ters : with a power of three hundred, any 
one of them becomes a sizable picture. You 
may see, if you will, the majesty of Wash- 
ington on his noble features, or the will of 
Jackson in those hard lines of the long face, 
crowned with that bristling head of hair in 
a perpetual state of electrical divergence 
and centrifugal self-assertion. Remember 
that each" of these faces is the record of a 
life. 

Now recollect that there was an interval 
between the exposure of the negative in the 
camera and its development by pouring a 
wash over it, when all these pictured objects 
existed ^ potentially, but absolutely invisible, 
and incapable of recognition, in a speck of col- 
lodion-film, which a pin's head would cover ; 
and then think what Alexandrian libraries, 
what Congressional document-loads of posi- 
tively intelligible characters, — such as one 
look of the recording angel would bring out ,• 



74 MECHANISM 

many of which we can ourselves develop 
at will, or which come before our eyes unbid- 
den, like " Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin," 
— micrht be held in those convolutions of the 
brain which wrap the talent intrusted to us, 
too often as the folded napkin of the slothful 
servant hid the treasure his master had lent 
him ! 1 

^ " Eas mutationes in sensorio conservatas, ideas 
multi, nos vestigia rerum vocabimus, quae non in 
iiiente sed in ipso corpore, et in medulla quidem 
c(^rebri ineifabili modo incredibiliter minutis 7iotis 
et copia infinita inscriptse sunt." — Haller, quot- 
ed by Dr. Laycock : Brit, and For. Med. Rev., xix. 
310. 

''Different matters are arranged in my head," 
said Napoleon, "as in drawers. I open one drawer, 
and close another, as I wish. I have never been 
kept awake by an involuntary pre-occupation of 
the mind. If I desire repose, I shut up all the 
drawers, and sleep. I have always slept when I 
wanted rest, and almost at will." — Table- Talk and 
Ojjuiions of Napoleon Buonaparte^ London, 1869, 
p. 10. 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 75 

Three facts, so familiar that I need onl}'- 
allude to them, show how much more is re- 
corded in the memory than we may ever take 
co^rnizance of. The first is the conviction 
of having been in the same precise circum- 
stances once or ma'ny times before. Dr. 
Wigan says, never but once ; but such is not 
my experience. The second is the panorama 
of their past lives, said, by people rescued 
from drowning, to have flashed before them.^ 

^ The following story is related as fact. I con- 
dense it from the newspaper account. 

'^ A held a bond against B for several hundred 
dollars. When it became due, he searched for it, 
but could not find it. He told the facts to B, who 
denied having given the bond, and intimated a 
fraudulent design on the part of A, who was com- 
pelled to submit to his loss and the charge against 
him. Years afterward, A was bathing in Charles 
Eiver, when he was seized with cramp, and nearly 
drowned. On coming to his senses, he went to 
his bookcase, took out a book, and from between 
its leaves took the missing bond. In the sudden 
picture of his entire life, which flashed before him 



76 MECIIAmSM 

I had it once myself, accompanied by an 
ignoble ducking and scrambling self-rescue. 
The third is the revival of apparently obsolete 
impressions, of which many strange cases are 
related in nervous young women and in 
dying persons, and which the story of the 
dog Argus in the " Odyssey," and of the 
parrot so charmingly told by Campbell, 
would lead us to suppose not of rare occur- 
rence in animals.^ It is possible, therefore, 

as he was sinking, the act of putting the bond in 
the book, and the book in the bookcasCy had re- 
presented itself." 

The reader who hkes to hear the whole of a 
story may be pleased to learn that the debt was 
paid with interest. 

^ " A troop of cavahy which had served on the 
Continent was disbanded in York. Sir Eobert 
Clayton turned out the old horses in Knavesmire 
to have their run for life. One day, while grazing 
promiscuously and apart from each other, a storm 
gathered ; and, when the thunder pealed and the 
lightning flashed, they were seen to get together, 
and form in line, in almost as perfect order as 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 77 

and I have tried to show that it is not im- 
probable, that memory is a material record ; 
that the brain is scarred and seamed with 
infinitesimal hieroglj^phics, as the features 
are engraved with the traces of thought and 
passion. And, if this is so, must not the 
record, we ask, perish with the organ ? Alas ! 
how often do we see it perish before the 
organ ! — the mighty satirist tamed into obliv- 
ious imbecility ; the great scholar wandering 
without sense of time or place among his 
alcoves, taking his books one by one from the 
shelves, and fondly patting them ; a child 

if they had had their old masters on their backs/' — 
Laycock : Brit and For. Med. Bev., vol. xix. 309. 
" After the slaughter at Vionville, on the 18th 
of August (last), a strange and touching specta- 
cle was presented. On the evening-call being 
sounded by the first regiment of Dragoons of the 
Guard, six hundred and two riderless horses an- 
swered to the summons, — jaded, and in many 
cases maimed. The noble animals still retained 
their disciplined habits." — German Fost, quoted 
by the Sjpectator. 



78 MECHANISM 

once more among his toj^s, but a child whose 
to-moiTows come hungry, and not full-handed, 
— come as birds of prey in. the place of the 
sweet singers of morning. We must all be- 
come as little children if we live long enough ; 
but how blank an existence the wrinkled in- 
fant must carry into the kingdom of heaven, 
if the Power that gave him memory does not 
repeat the miracle by restoring it ! 

The connection between thought and the 
structure and condition of the brain is evi- 
dently so close, that all we have to do is to 
study it. It is not in this direction that 
materialism is to be feared : we do not find 
Hamlet and Faust, right and wrong, the 
valor of men and the purity of women, by 
testing for albumen, or examining fibres in 
microscopes. 

It is in the moral world that materialism 
has worked the strangest confusion. In vari- 
ous forms, under imposing names and aspects, 
it has thrust itself into the moral relations, 
until one hardly knows where to look for any 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 79 

first principles without upsetting every thing 
in searching for them. 

The moral universe includes nothing but 
the exercise of choice : all else is machinery. 
What we can help and what we cannot help 
are on two sides of a line which separates 
the sphere of human responsibility from that 
of the Being who has arranged and controls 
the order of things. - 

The question of the freedom of the will 
has been an open one, from the days of Mil- 
ton's demons in conclave, to the recent most 
noteworthy essay of Mr. Hazard, our Rhode- 
Island neighbor.^ It still hangs suspended 
between the seemingly exhaustive strongest 
motive argument and certain residual convic- 
tions. The sense that we are, to a limited 
extent, self-determining ; the sense of effort 
hi willing ; the sense of responsibility in view 
of the future, and the verdict of conscience 

1 " Witness on him that any parfit clerk is, 
That in scole is gret altercation 
In this matere, and gret disputison, 
And hath ben, of an hundred thousand men ; 
But I ne cannot boult it to the bren." 

Chaucer : The Nonne's Preeste's Tale. 



80 MECHANISM 

in review of the past, — all of these are open 
to the accusation of fallacy ; but they all leave 
a certain undischarged balance in most minds.^ 
We can invoke the strong arm of the Bens 
ex maehina^ as Mr. Hazard, and Kant and 
others, before him, have done. Our will may 
be a primary initiating cause or force, as un- 
explainable, as unreducible, as indecomposa- 
ble, as impossible if you choose, but as real 
to our belief, as the ceternitas a parte ante. 
The divine foreknov/ledge is no more in the 
way of delegated choice than the divine om- 
nipotence is in the way of delegated power. 
The Infinite can surely slip the cable of the 
finite if it choose so to do. 

^ " But, sir, as to the doctrine of necessity, no 
man believes it. If a man should give me argu- 
ments that I do not see, though I could not answer 
them, should I believe that I do not see?" — Bos- 
well's Life of Johnson. London, 1848, vol. viii. 
p. 331. 

*' What have you to do with liberty and neces- 
sity ? or what more than to hold your tongue 
about it ? " — Johnson to Boswell : Ibid., 
Letter 396. 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 81 

It is one thing to prove a proposition, like 
the doctrine of necessity in terms, and an- 
other thing to accept it as an article of faith. 
There are cases in which I would oppose to 
the eredo quia impossibile est a paradox as 
bold and as serviceable, — nego quia probatum 
est Even Mr. Huxley, who throws quite as 
much responsibility on protoplasm as it will 
bear, allows that "our volition counts for 
somethinQ^ as a condition of the course of 
events." 

I reject, therefore, the mechanical doctrine 
which makes me the slave of outside influ- 
ences, whether it work with the logic of Ed- 
wards, or the averages of Buclde ; whether it 
come in the shape of the Greek's destiny, or 
the Mahometan's fatalism ; or in that other 
aspect,- dear to the band of believers, whom 
Beesly of Everton, speaking in the character 
of John Wesley, characterized as 

" The crocodile crew that believe in election." ^ 



^ Southey's Life of Wesley, vol. ii. note 28. 



82 MECHANISM 

But I claim the right to eliminate all me- 
chanical ideas which have crowded into the 
sphere of intelligent choice between right 
and wrong. The pound of flesh I will grant 
to Nemesis ; but, in the name of human 
nature, not one drop of blood, — not one 
drop. 

Moral chaos began with the idea of trans- 
missible responsibility.^ It seems the stalest 

^ " II est sans doute qu'il n'y-a rien qui cheque 
plus notre raison que de dire que le peche du pre- 
mier homme ait rendu coupables ceux qui, ^tant si 
^loignes de cette source, sembleut incapables d'y 
participer. Get ecoulement ne nous parait pas 
seulement impossible, il nous semble meme tres 
injuste ; car qu'y-a-t-il de plus contraire au regies 
de notre miserable justice que de damner eternelle- 
ment un enfant incapable de volonte, pour un 
pecli4 oil il parait avoir si pen d^e part, qu'il est 
commis six mille ans avant qu'il fut en etre?" — 
Pascal : Pensees, c. x. § I. 

"Justice" and "Mercy" often have a techni- 
cal meaning when applied to the Supreme Being. 
Mr. J. S. Mill has expressed himself very freely 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 83 

of truisms to say that every moral act, depend- 
ing as it does on choice, is in its nature exclu- 
sively personal ; that its penalt}^, if it have 
any, is payable, not to bearer, not to order, 
but only to the creditor himself. To treat 

as to this juggling with words. — Examination 
of Sir W. Hamilton's Philosophy^ i. 131. 

The Komanists fear for the future welfare of 
babes that perish unborn; and the extraordinary 
means, that are taken to avert their impending 
" punishment "' are well known. 

Thomas Shepard, our famous Cambridge minis- 
ter, seems to have shared these apprehensions. — 
See his Letter i?i Young's Chronicles of the Pil- 
grims of Massachusetts, p. 63S. Boston, 1846. 

The author of " The Day of Boom " is forced by 
his logic to hand the infants over to the official 
tormentor, only assigning them the least uncom- 
fortable of the torture-chambers. 

However these doctrines may be softened in the 
belief of many, the primary barbarism on which 
they rest — that is, the transfer of mechanical 
ideas into' the world of morals, with which they 
are in no sense homologous — is almost universally 
prevalent, and like to be at present. 



84 MECHANISM 

a mal-volition, which id inseparably involved 
with an internal condition, as capable of 
external transfer from one person to another, 
is simply to materialize it. When we can 
take the dimensions of virtue by triangula- 
tion; when we can literally weigh Justice 
in her own scales ; when we can speak of 
the specific gravity of truth, or the square 
root of honesty ; when we can send a states- 
man his integrity in a package to Washington, 
if he happen to have left it behind, — then 
we may begin to speak of the moral charac- 
ter of inherited tendencies, which belong to 
the machiner}^ for which the Sovereign 
Power alone is responsible. The misfortune 
of perverse instincts, which adhere to us as 
congenital inheritances, should go to our side 
of the account, if the books of heaven are 
kept, as the great Church of Christendom 
maintains they are, by double entry. But 
the absurdity which has been held up to 
ridicule in the nursery has been enforced 
as the highest reason upon older children. 
Did our forefathers tolerate iEsop among 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS, 85 

them ? "I cannot trouble the water where 
you are," says the lamb to the wolf : " don't 
you see that I am farther down .the 
stream?" — ''But a year ago you called 
me ill names." — "O sir! a year ago I was 
not born." — ^'^ Sirrah," replies the wolf, "if 
it was not you, it was your father, and that 
is all one ; " and finishes with the usual 
practical application.- 

If a created- being has no rights which his 
Creator is bound to respect, there is an end 
to all moral relations between them. Good 
Father Abraham thought he had, and did 
not hesitate to give his opinion. " Far be it 
from Thee," he says, to do so and so. And 
Pascal, whose reverence amounted to theo- 
phobia,^ could treat of the duties of the Su- 

^ I use this term to designate a state of mind 
thus described by Jeremy Taylor : " There are 
some persons so miserable and scrupulous, such 
perpetual tormentors of themselves with unneces- 
sary fears, that their meat and drink is a snare to 
their consciences. 

" These persons do not believe noble things of 
God." 



86 MECHANISM 

preme to the dependent being.^ If we suffer 
for any thing except our own wrong-doing, 
to call it punishment is like speaking of a 
yard of veracity or a square inch of magna- 
nimity. 

So to rate the gravity of a mal-volition by 
its consequences is the merest sensational ma- 
terialism. A little child takes a prohibited 
friction-match : it kindles a conflagration with 
it, which burns down the house, and perishes 
itself in the flames. Mechanically, this child 
was an incendiary and a suicide ; morally, 
neither. Shall we hesitate to speak as chari- 
tably of multitudes of weak and ignorant 
grown-up children, moving about on a planet 
whose air is a deadly poison, which kills all 
that breathe it four or five scores of years ? 

Closely allied to tliis is the pretence that 
the liabilities incurred by any act of mal-voli- 

^ " II y a un devoir reciproque entre Dieu et les 
hommes. . . . Quid dehui ? ^ accusez moi/ dit Dieu 
dans Isaie. Dieu doit accomplir ?es promesses," 
&c. — Pensees, xxiii. 3. 



/ 

IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 87 

tion are to be measured on the scale of the 
Infinite, and not on that of the total moral 
capacity of the finite agent, — a mechanical 
application of the Oriental way of dealing 
with offences. The sheik or sultan chops a 
man's head off for a look he does not like : it 
is not the amount of wrong, but the impor- 
tance of the personage who has been out- 
raged. We have none of those moral rela- 
tions with power, as such, which the habitual 
Eastern modes of speech seem to imply. 

The next movement in moral materialism 
is to establish a kind of scale of equivalents 
between perverse moral choice and physical 
suffering. Pain often cures ignorance, as we 
know, — as when a child learns not to handle 
fire by burning its fingers, — but it does not 
change the moral nature.^ Children may 
be whipped into obedience, but not into vir- 
tue ; and it is not pretended that the penal 

^ "No troubles will, of themselves, work a 
change in a wicked heart." — Matthew Henky : 
Com. on Luke, xxiii. 29. 



88 MECHANISM 

colony of heaven has sent back a single re- 
formed crimmal. We hang men for our con- 
venience or safety ; sometimes shoot them for 
revenge. Thus we come to associate the in- 
fliction of injury with offences as their satis- 
factory settlement, — a kind of neutralization 
of them, as of an acid with an alkali : so that 
we feel as if a jarring moral universe would be 
all right if only suffering enough were added 
to it. This scheme of chemical equivalents 
seems to me, I confess, a worse materialism 
than making protoplasm master of arts, and 
doctor of divinity. 

Another mechanical notion is that which 
treats moral evil as bodily disease has so long 
been treated, — as being a distinct entity, a 
demon to be expelled, a load to be got rid 
of, instead of a condition, or the result of a 
condition.^ But what is most singular in the 
case of moral disease is, that it has been for- 
gotten that it is a living creature in which it 

^ " The strength of modern therapeutics lies in 
the clearer perception, than formerly, of the great 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 89 

occurs, and that all living creatures are the 
subjects of natural and spontaneous healing 
processes. A broken vase cannot mend itself; 
but a broken bone can. Nature, that is, the 
Divinity, in his every-day working methods, 
will soon make it as strong as ever. 

Suppose the beneficent self-healing process 
to have repaired the wound in the moral na- 
ture : is it never to become an honest scar, 
but always liable to be re-opened ? Is there 
no outlawry of an obsolete self-determination ? 
If the President of the Societ}^ for the Preven- 
tion of Cruelty to Animals impaled a fly on a 
pin when he was ten years old, is it to stand 
against him, crying for a stake through his 
body, in scecula sceculorum ? ^ The most popu- 

trutli, that diseases are but perverted life-processes, 
and have for their natural history, not only a be- 
ginning, but equally a period of culmination and 
dechne." — Medicine in Modern Times. Dr. Gull's 
Address, p. 187. 

^ There is no more significant evidence of natu- 
ral moral evolution than the way in which children 



90 MECHANISM 

lar liymn of Protestantism, and the "Dies 
Irse" of Romanism, are based on this assump- 
tfon ; Nil inultum remanehit. So it is that a 
condition of a conscious being has been 
materiahzed into a purely inorganic brute 
fact, — not merely dehumanized, but de- 
animalized and devitalized. 

Here it was that Swedenborg, whose 
whole secret I will not pretend to have fully 
opened, though I have tried with the key of 
a thinker whom I love and honor, — that Swe- 
denborg, I sa}^, seems to have come in, if not 
with a new revelation, at least infusing new 
life into the earlier ones. WTiat we are will 
determine the company we are to keep, and 
not the avoirdupois weight of our moral exu- 
via3, strapped on our shoulders like a porter's 
burden. 

outgrow the cruelty which is so common in what 
we call their tender years. 

" As ruthless as a baby with a worm ; 
As cruel as a schoolboy ere he grows 
To pity, — more from ignorance than will." 

Tenntson : Walking to the Mail. 



IN TIIOUGHT AND MORALS. 91 

Having once materialized the whole prov- 
ince of self-determination and its conse- 
quences, the next thing is, of course, to 
materialize the methods of avoiding these 
consequences. We are all, more or less, 
idolaters, and believers in quackery. We love 
specifics better than regimen, and observances 
better than self-government. The moment 
our belief divorces itself from character, the 
mechanical element begins to gain upon it, 
and tends to its logical conclusion in the Jap- 
anese prayer-mill.^ 

^ One can easily conceive the confusion which 
might be wrought in young minds by such teaching 
as this of our excellent Thomas Shepard : — 

" The Paths to Hell be but two : the first is the 
Path of Sin, which is a dirty Way ; Secondly, the 
Path of Duties, which (rested in) is but a cleaner 
Way." — "Quoted by Israel Loring, Pastor of the 
West Church in Sudbury, in " A PractiGal Dis- 
course/' &c. Boston : Kneeland and Green, 
1740. 

However sound the doctrine, it is sure to lead 
to the substitution of some easy mechanical contri- 



92 MECHANISM 

Brothers of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, 
my slight task is finished. I have always 
regarded these occasions as giving an oppor- 
tunity of furnishing hints for future study, 
rather than of exhibiting the detailed results 
of thought. I cannot but hope that I have 
tlirown some ray of suggestion, or brought 
out some clink of questionable soundness, 
Y/hich will justify me for appearing with the 
lantern and the hammer. 

The hardest and most painful task of the 
student of to-day is to occidentalize and 
modernize the Asiatic modes of thought 
which have come down to us closely wedded 
to medieeval interpretations. We are called 
upon to assert the rights and dignity of our 
humanity, if it were only that our worship 
might be worthy the acceptance of a wise and 
magnanimous Sovereign. Self-abasement is 
the proper sign of homage to superiors with 

vance — some rite, penance, or formula — for per- 
petual and ever-renewed acts of moral self-deter- 
mination. 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 93 

the Oriental. The Occidental demands seK- 
respect in his inferiors as a condition of 
accepting their tribute to him as of any 
value. The kotou in all its forms, the pitiful 
acts of ereeping., crawling., fawning., like a 
dog at his master^s feet., ( which acts are 
signified by the word we translate worship., 
according to the learned editor of " The 
Comprehensive Commentary," ) ^ are offen- 
sive, not gratifying, to him. Does not the 
man of science who accepts with true manly 
reverence the facts of Nature, in the face of 
ail his venerated traditions, offer a more ac- 
ceptable service than he who repeats the for- 
mulae, and copies the gestures, derived from 
the language and customs of despots and 
their subjects ? The attitude of modern 
Science is erect, her aspect serene, her de- 
termination inexorable, her onward move- 
ment unflinching ; because she believes her- 
self, in the order of Providence, the true 
successor of the men of old who brought 
down the light of heaven to men. She has 

^ See note on Matthew, xi. 11. 



94 MECHANISM 

reclaimed astronomy and cosmogony, and is 
already laying a firm hand .on anthropology, 
over which another battle must be fought, 
with the usual result, to come sooner or later. 
Humility may be taken for granted as exist- 
ing in every sane human being ; but it may 
be that it most truly manifests itself to-day in 
the readiness with which we bow to new truths 
as they come from the scholars, the teachers, to 
whom the inspiration of the Almighty giveth 
understanding. If a man should try to show 
it in the way good men did of old, — by 
covering himself with tow-cloth, sitting on 
an ash-heap, and disfiguring his person, — 
we should send him straightway to Worces- 
ter or Somerville ; and, if he began to " rend 
his garments," it would suggest the need of 
a strait-jacket. 

Our rocky New England and old rocky 
Judsea always seem to have a kind of yearn- 
ing for each other : Jerusalem governs Mas- 
sachusetts, and Massachusetts would like to 
colonize Jerusalem. 

" The pine-tree dreameth of the palm, 
The palm-tree of the pine." 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 95 

But political freedom inevitably generates 
a new type of religious character, as the con- 
clave that contemplates endowing a dotard 
with infallibility • has found out, we trust, 
before this time.^ The American of to-day 
may challenge for himself the noble frank- 
ness in his highest relations which did honor 
to the courage of the Father of the Faithful. 

And he may well- ask, in view of the 
slavish beliefs which have governed so large a 
part of Christendom, whether it was an ascent 
or a descent from the. Roman's 

Si fractus illabatur orhis 
Impavldum ferient ruince 

to the monk's 

Quid sum miser tunc facturus, 
Quern pafronum rogaturus ? 

Who can help asking such questions as he 
sits in the hght of those blazing windows of 
the ritual renaissance, burning with hectic 

^ We have since discovered that the dogma was 
a foregone conclusion. 



96 MECHANISM 

colors like the leaves of the decaying forest 
before the wind has swept it bare, and listens 
to the delicious strains of the quartet as it 
carols forth its smiling devotions ? 

Our dwellings are built on the shell-heaps, 
the kitchen-middens of the age of stone. 
Inherited beliefs,* as obscure in their origin 
as the parentage of the cave-dwellers, are 
stronger with many minds than the evidence 
of the senses and the simplest deductions of 
the intelligence. Persons outside of Bedlam 
can talk of the " dreadful depravity of luna- 
tics," — the sufferers whom we have learned 
to treat with the tenderest care, as the most 
to be pitied of all God's children.^ Mr. 
Gosse can believe that a fossil skeleton, with 
the remains of food in its interior, was never 
part of a living creature, but was made just 
as we find it,"^ — a kind of stage-property, a 



> Brit, and Foreign Med. Keview for July, 
1841 ; Wigan, op. cit. 

2 Owen, in Encyc. Brit., art. " Paleontology," 
p. 124, note. 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 97 

clever cheat, got up by the great Manager of 
the original Globe Theatre. All we can say 
of such persons is, that their " illative sense," 
to use Dr. Newman's phrase, seems to most 
of us abnormal and unhealthy. We can- 
not help looking at them as affected with a 
kind of mental Daltonism. 

" Believing ignorance," said an old Scotch 
divine, " is much better than rash and pre- 
sumptuous knowledge." ^ But which is most 
likely to be presumptuous, — ignorance, or 
knowledge ? True faith and true philosophy 
ought to be one ; and those disputes, — d double 
verite^ — those statements, " true according 
to pliilosophy, and false according to fg,ith," 
condemned by the last Council of Lateran,^ 
ought not to find a place in the records of an 
age like our own. Yet so enlightened a philos- 
opher as Faraday could say in a letter to one 
of his correspondents, '' I claim an absolute 

^ Buckle, Hist, of Civilization, ii. 327, note. 
^ Leibnitz : Consid. sur la Doctrine d'un Esprit 
Universel. 



98 MECHANISM 

distinction between a religious and an ordina- 
ry belief. If I am reproached for weakness 
in refusing to apply those mental operations, 
which I think good in high things, to the 
very highest, I am content to bear the re- 
proach." 

We must bestir ourselves ; for the new 
generation is upon us, — the marrow-bone- 
splitting descendants of the old canni- 
bal troglodytes. Civilized as well as savage 
races live upon their parents and grand- 
parents. Each generation strangles and de- 
vours its predecessor. The young Feejeean 
carries a cord in his girdle for his father's neck; 
the young American, a string of propositions 
or syllogisms in his brain to finish the same 
relative. The old man says, " Son, I have 
swallowed and digested the wisdom of the 
past." The young man says, " Sire, I proceed 
to swallow and digest thee with all thou 
knowest." There never was a sand-glass, 
nor a clepsydra, nor a horologe, that counted 
the hours and days and years with such 
terrible sisfnificance as this academic chrono- 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 99 

graph which has just completed a revolution. 
The prologue of life is finished here at 
twenty : then come five acts of a decade 
each, and the play is over, with now and 
then a pleasant or a tedious afterpiece, when 
half the lights are put out, and half the 
orchestra is gone. 

We have just seen a life finished whose 
whok compass was .included within the re- 
membered years of many among us. Why 
was our great prose-minstrel mourned by 
nations, and buried with kings ? Not merely 
because of that genius, prolific as Nature 
herself, we might almost say, in types of 
character, and aspects of life, whom, for 
this sufficient reason, we dare to name in 
connection with the great romancer of the 
North, and even with the suprerae poet of 
mankind, — was he not a kind of Shakspeare, 
working in terra-cotta instead of marble ? — 
but because he vindicated humanity, not 
against its Maker, but against itself ; because 
he took the part of his frail, erring, sorrow- 
ing, dying fellow-creature, against the de- 



100 MECHANISM 

monologists who had pretended to write the 
history of human nature, with a voice that 
touched the heart as no other had done since 
the Scotch peasant was laid down to slumber 
in the soil his song had hallowed.^ 

We are not called to mourn over the 
frailties of the great story-teller, as we must 
sorrow in remembering those of the sweet 
singer of Scotland. But we all need forgive- 
ness ; . and there must be generous failings in 
every true manhood which it makes Heaven 
itself happier to pardon. " I am very hu- 
man," Dickens said to me one of the last 
times I ever met him. And so I feel as if 



^ Providence has arranged an admirable system 
of compensations in the distribution of talents and 
instincts : so that, as in the rule of three, the prod- 
uct of the extremes of belief equals that of the 
middle terms ; or, as in the astatic needles, the op- 
posite polar forces are balanced against each other. 
In Scotland, the creed is the Westminster Confes- 
sion, and the national poet is Burns. In England, 
Bunyan stands at one end of the shelf, and Dick- 
ens at the other. 



IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 101 

I might repeat, in tender remembrance of 
Charles Dickens, a few of the lines I wrote 
some years ago as my poor tribute to the 
memory of Robert Burns : — 

We praise him, not for gifts divine ; 

His Muse was born of woman ; 
His manhood breathes in every line : 

Was ever heart more human ? 

We love him, praise him, just for this, — 

In every form and feature, 
Thiough wealth and want, through woe and bliss, 

He saw his fellow-creature. 

Ay, Heaven had set one living man 
. Beyond the pedant's tether : 
His virtues, frailties, He may scan 
Who weighs them aU together. 



1S 



il 



iii 



iiiiiil 



iii.i.iya KHtuii 



ONGBESS 




